A basic form of church planting is multiplying services. It's one of the basic ways to grow your church and reach new people. But is it really church planting? Yes and No.
Here are some of the problems with multiplying services:
- You run the risk of just duplicating what you are already doing, rather than doing the hard planning, contextualisation and planning for outreach.
- Multiplying services can place a limitation on leadership development. All leaders of the new service still sit under the leaders, eldership, parish council of the existing service. There is a glass ceiling to full responsibility.
- The new service rarely has the full range of duties and services of a new church. This makes it easier to start a new service, but stops the new service from developing a robust life of its own.
- The leader of the new service need not be as much of a pioneering leader, because the new service may ride the wave of the existing service's momentum. Focusing on starting new services can let us off the hook of recruiting pioneering leaders.
9 comments:
When the new service(s) have the same leader there's so much less of the leader to go around. The ministers busyness, even if it's still manageable for him, can be difficult to bear for the congregation(s).
Hey Mikey, just a side note - I appreciate that your posts are often concise and always readable. I realised that if there's new items in google reader I don't hesitate to click on them, like I do some other blogs.
(deleted duplicate)
Thanks for your kind comment, Bron.
This sounds like an exercise in semantics. Is it really church planting? Maybe. Maybe not. Who gets to decide? And does it matter?
Maybe it's me. But it seems like the church planting bar is getting higher and higher. I reckon if I were to scour just the blogs that I read and pull out all the qualifiers and criticisms of what some think "church planting" is then it would make for depressing reading.
I reckon multiplying services is a good way to handle rapid growth, but a bad way to handle long-term growth.
I disagree that it lets us off the hook of recruiting pioneering leaders for that reason -- long-term growth is still best handled by planting, and that requires pioneers.
@Al - it depends which part of the discussion you're hearing. My 'Yes it is church planting' is genuine. Multiplying services is a legitimate sub-group.
I spent a lot of time speaking at a a conference earlier this year emphasising the impulse to multiply ministries. Whether it's church or not is in a sense irrelevant.
*But* my fear is that with the current appeal of church planting, many things are baptised as church planting, but nobig risks are taken. That'd be a bummer.
@ Laura - I was saying that 'let you off the hook of recruiting pioneers leaders' was a bad effect, not a good short cut!
Right, that's what I'm saying, Mikey. It would be bad if it let us off the hook for training church leaders. But I don't think service multiplication necessarily does that.
In our case, service multiplication was essential because we had such rapid growth when we moved into our building, but it didn't reduce the sense of urgency for church planting and training. It just gave us the ability to stabilize so that we could continue with our church planting efforts.
Post a Comment